Skip to content
Search

Latest Stories

Top Stories

Project 2025: An introduction

President Donald Trump

Project 2025 offers a conservative plan for the first 180 days of a second Trump administration.

Alex Wong/Getty Images

Breslin is the Joseph C. Palamountain Jr. Chair of Political Science at Skidmore College and author of “A Constitution for the Living: Imagining How Five Generations of Americans Would Rewrite the Nation’s Fundamental Law.”

This is part of a series offering a nonpartisan counter to Project 2025, a conservative guideline to reforming government and policymaking during the first 180 days of a second Trump administration. The Fulcrum's cross partisan analysis of Project 2025 relies on unbiased critical thinking, reexamines outdated assumptions, and uses reason, scientific evidence, and data in analyzing and critiquing Project 2025

The Framers of America’s Constitution feared the rise of the demagogue, the self-styled leader who can manipulate the masses, often in their own self-interest, against the polity’s traditional political elite. George Washington was particularly attuned to such a possibility. In a letter to the Marquis de Lafayette he confessed fearing a movement “by some aspiring demagogue who will not consult the interest of his country so much as his own ambitious views.”

Americans should dread any demagogic movement — from the left or the right. Indeed, American citizens should remain vigilant against any effort to design political systems, policies, enactments or actions around the cult of personality. In practical terms, we should reject any attempt to lionize the likes of Joe Biden or Donald Trump, Barack Obama or Ronald Reagan. It’s about the institutions in America; it’s always been about the institutions. America’s system of separate powers, checks and balances, bicameralism, federalism, and the like works only if formal political power is distributed — not concentrated — and political branches — not individuals or parties — maintain their institutional integrity. Effective government has always required institutional collaboration.


Sadly, “ Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise ” — the Heritage Foundation’s 800-plus-page playbook for Trump’s first 180 days in office, commonly known as Project 2025 — spurns that crucial lesson. Kevin Roberts, the organization’s outspoken president, wrote the foreword. In it, he describes the purpose of Project 2025, the four conservative promises, and, dispiritingly, his enemy. “This book, this agenda, the entire Project 2025,” he announces, “is a plan to unite the conservative movement and the American people against elite rule and woke culture warriors.” In Roberts’ own words, Project 2025 is a plan to “ institutionalize Trumpism.” Institutionalize Trumpism? Cover your ears, Gen. Washington, sir.

Roberts briefly outlines the components of the plan. The next conservative president, he says, will focus on “four broad fronts that will decide America’s future”:

  1. Restore the family as the centerpiece of American life and protect our children.
  2. Dismantle the administrative state and return self-governance to the American people.
  3. Defend our nation’s sovereignty, borders, and bounty against global threats.
  4. Secure our God-given individual rights to live freely — what our Constitution calls the “Blessings of Liberty.”

All four, save the nod to natural, God-given rights and the use of the term “dismantle” to streamline the administrative state, are by themselves laudable goals. I can’t imagine the left protesting too loudly. And yet the devil, as always, is in the details. Restoring the family as the centerpiece of American life and securing God-given individual rights, we come to realize, are a sort of shorthand for a Christian nationalist agenda. The only family Roberts embraces is the traditional one.

Reading on, we further discover that “defending the nation’s sovereignty, borders, and bounty” are fashionable buzz words for a neo-isolationist foreign policy. You’re on your own President Zelensky, Roberts is saying. He then takes direct aim at “transgender ideology,” “critical race theory,” DEI initiatives, intersectionality, positionality, socialism, “Big Tech,” TikTok, green energy, progressive school libraries and on. And on. And on. Now I can hear the left objecting.

The buckshot approach to political warfare — pull the trigger and try to destroy everything in eyesight — is preferred nowadays by both the right and the left. Roberts employs it here. The America Roberts envisions may reject wokeness, but it also forsakes the splendor of good old-fashioned tolerance. And therein lies the rub. Shouldn’t we teach our children (as Jesus did) to be tolerant of others? Doesn’t the ability to live freely mean that we won’t pass judgment on those who freely decide to live authentically? Doesn’t self-governance mean that majority support for abortion rights, gay rights, separation of church and state, open dialogue, robust library shelves and so on ought to prevail?

I’ve never met Kevin Roberts or the other creators of Project 2025, and I’m going to assume they’re not evil. But neither are they helping. Their solution to a declining America is to flatten the proverbial strawman. Enough, we say! The time has come for a new approach. It seems so clear that a cross-partisan effort to solve America’s wicked problems is the only answer. Let us begin.

More articles about Project 2025


    Read More

    Veterans’ Care at Risk Under Trump As Hundreds of Doctors and Nurses Reject Working at VA Hospitals
    Photo illustration by Lisa Larson-Walker/ProPublica

    Veterans’ Care at Risk Under Trump As Hundreds of Doctors and Nurses Reject Working at VA Hospitals

    Veterans hospitals are struggling to replace hundreds of doctors and nurses who have left the health care system this year as the Trump administration pursues its pledge to simultaneously slash Department of Veterans Affairs staff and improve care.

    Many job applicants are turning down offers, worried that the positions are not stable and uneasy with the overall direction of the agency, according to internal documents examined by ProPublica. The records show nearly 4 in 10 of the roughly 2,000 doctors offered jobs from January through March of this year turned them down. That is quadruple the rate of doctors rejecting offers during the same time period last year.

    Keep ReadingShow less
    Protecting the U.S. Press: The PRESS Act and What It Could Mean for Journalists

    The Protect Reporters from Excessive State Suppression (PRESS) Act aims to fill the national shield law gap by providing two protections for journalists.

    Getty Images, Manu Vega

    Protecting the U.S. Press: The PRESS Act and What It Could Mean for Journalists

    The First Amendment protects journalists during the news-gathering and publication processes. For example, under the First Amendment, reporters cannot be forced to report on an issue. However, the press is not entitled to different legal protections compared to a general member of the public under the First Amendment.

    In the United States, there are protections for journalists beyond the First Amendment, including shield laws that protect journalists from pressure to reveal sources or information during news-gathering. 48 states and the District of Columbia have shield laws, but protections vary widely. There is currently no federal shield law. As of 2019, at least 22 journalists have been jailed in the U.S. for refusing to comply with requests to reveal sources of information. Seven other journalists have been jailed and fined for the same reason.

    Keep ReadingShow less
    Democrats Score Strategic Wins Amid Redistricting Battles

    Democrat Donkey is winning arm wrestling match against Republican elephant

    AI generated image

    Democrats Score Strategic Wins Amid Redistricting Battles

    Democrats are quietly building momentum in the 2025 election cycle, notching two key legislative flips in special elections and gaining ground in early polling ahead of the 2026 midterms. While the victories are modest in number, they signal a potential shift in voter sentiment — and a brewing backlash against Republican-led redistricting efforts.

    Out of 40 special elections held across the United States so far in 2025, only two seats have changed party control — both flipping from Republican to Democrat.

    Keep ReadingShow less
    Policing or Occupation? Trump’s Militarizing America’s Cities Sets a Dangerous Precedent

    A DC Metropolitan Police Department car is parked near a rally against the Trump Administration's federal takeover of the District of Columbia, outside of the AFL-CIO on August 11, 2025 in Washington, DC.

    (Photo by Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)

    Policing or Occupation? Trump’s Militarizing America’s Cities Sets a Dangerous Precedent

    President Trump announced the activation of hundreds of National Guard troops in Washington, D.C., along with the deployment of federal agents—including more than 100 from the FBI. This comes despite Justice Department data showing that violent crime in D.C. fell 35% from 2023 to 2024, reaching its lowest point in over three decades. These aren’t abstract numbers—they paint a picture of a city safer than it has been in a generation, with fewer homicides, assaults, and robberies than at any point since the early 1990s.

    The contradiction could not be more glaring: the same president who, on January 6, 2021, stalled for hours as a violent uprising engulfed the Capitol is now rushing to “liberate” a city that—based on federal data—hasn’t been this safe in more than thirty years. Then, when democracy itself was under siege, urgency gave way to dithering; today, with no comparable emergency—only vague claims of lawlessness—he mobilizes troops for a mission that looks less like public safety and more like political theater. The disparity between those two moments is more than irony; it is a blueprint for how power can be selectively applied, depending on whose power is threatened.

    Keep ReadingShow less